At some stage early next week (exact time TBC) we will be upgrading the forums to vBulletin 4. It is a massive upgrade and will take several hours.

For those people that haven't seen vB4, it is markedly different to our current version (vB3.8.5) and may take some getting used to. As with any big aesthetic change, some of you will love it and some of you won't. For the record - I do.

There are bound to be some bugs but we've been testing for a while now so I hope (and pray) that those will be minimal. I will start a thread for you to post anything that you notice.

I'll keep you updated with the details as they come to hand.

system
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2011-08-19T04:09:15Z —
#2

So, that extra 200k of bloated scripting nonsense with the associated accessibility train wreck that is vBull 4 -- so bad I can't believe they have the cojones to charge MONEY for that crap...

-- that determined to drive me away, huh? It's what stopped me from going to digitalpoint.

Or did the year plus delay on transitioning been from you folks taking the time to neuter out all the non-semantic usability nightmare their default skin saddles you with, so it's not wasting 160k of HTML on 15k of plaintext? Much less the 270k of scripting for nothing and 80k of "other documents" that get included for christmas only knows what reason?

... and to think 3 is a bloated mess; outright lean compared to 4. I'd be looking at other software instead of trying to upgrade this -- maybe with a mod for stopforumspam.com thrown in for good measure?

ralphm
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2011-08-19T05:07:36Z —
#3

deathshadow60 said:

that determined to drive me away, huh?

Yes indeed. The whole upgrade is being done because of you.

Well, given the usual length of your posts that criticize bad code, I assume from your relatively short post above that VB4 must be pretty good! (Or is that just a red rag to a bull? :eek: )

I'm glad at least that we'll have a table-less forum. Good luck with it, Sarah and team!

mmj
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2011-08-19T06:29:46Z —
#4

Wow that's pretty exciting. I was just visiting recently and thinking about how little the forums have changed in the last few years.

I don't suppose it's getting some sort of fancy design makeover too?

ralphm
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2011-08-19T07:01:50Z —
#5

mmj said:

I don't suppose it's getting some sort of fancy design makeover too?

O yeah, baby!

HAWK said:

... big aesthetic change ...

hairybob
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2011-08-19T09:34:07Z —
#6

While you're there, why don't you upgrade to some decent forum software such as IPB or xenforo.

I agree with deathshadow60 when it comes to VB4... it's a rubbish product that's slow to load and stops a community dead in its tracks.

VB4 is about as much fun as <snip/>.

system
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2011-08-19T10:50:08Z —
#7

ralph_m said:

I'm glad at least that we'll have a table-less forum.

Unfortunately that's where a lot of the problem lies -- since their baseline skin doesn't even used tables on tabular data, and abuses nested lists inside nested lists instead... to go hand in hand with the 80+K of cloaked content for unnecessary (and painfully useless) scripting.

Because nothing works wonders for a site like cloaked content and non-semantic markup... even sadder when the poor sods who wrote it thought they were being semantic just by removing ALL tables... Because four times as much markup with applying the wrong meanings to the content and COMPLETELY breaking the navigational relationships is SUCH an improvement.

TheRaptor
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2011-08-19T11:14:20Z —
#8

ralph_m said:

O yeah, baby!

Do we by any chance get a peak at what its going to look like, ahead of time? Like a screenshot or something?

I'll probably get used to it but I don't know if I'm thrilled. The change will probably mean:

more rounded edges and gradients (they seem trendy nowadays and regarded as 'modern', personally I've seen too many of them everywhere now and prefer a more straight design)

some ajax cool effects, like you hover over a link, title, etc. and a very pretty popup baloon appears trying to be helpful but actually covering the content all around that you just wanted to see, so you end up running away with your mouse cursor as far as possible from the site so as not to accidentally turn on some magick widget in fear of not being able to do what you came here to do: read content (see title links at Hardware and Software | Gaming Masters)

clean, clutter-free layout. This means that the important information that used to be visible always now appears only under certain conditions - for example, you won't see how many pages a thread has unless you hover your mouse over a row nor will you be able to see where you need to click to go to page 4 (again: Hardware and Software | Gaming Masters). Also, let's hide most of other controls and buttons like go to the last post, etc. so as not to scare away those who could get a headache from being overwhelmed with all that stuff. You'll have to click a lot more to do the same thing as before but at least the design is super clean and modern. Chrome users (and recent Firefox users) will find themselves at home!

no tables anywhere - at least someone can take a look at the huge css files and learn all the exotic hacks being used to make a table-like forum layout fit into a nested series of <li> and <div> tags. Well, html doesn't have any dedicated tags for discussion forums so a <table> is no less suitable than <li>, but at least the hard goal has been achieved.

Having said that - take it with a pinch of salt, these are more my personal observations of recent online discoveries than about the new Site Point forum which, well, I haven't seen yet!

SpikeZ
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2011-08-19T16:36:57Z —
#11

Thats what the default scheme looks like LJ, ours isnt going to look like that

TheRaptor
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2011-08-19T16:44:33Z —
#12

spikeZ said:

Thats what the default scheme looks like LJ, ours isnt going to look like that

I was hoping someone would say that. Good to know!

No sneak preview then?

SpikeZ
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2011-08-19T17:09:10Z —
#13

thats up to HQ mate

xhtmlcoder
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2011-08-19T17:13:52Z —
#14

Well, they aren't even giving me a sneak preview but better work correctly or they'll be a lot of SPF bug reports.

Sega
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2011-08-19T18:32:00Z —
#15

Will there be design changes to the forum. I don't really have experience in this VBulletin stuff, never really needed to go in it.

TheRaptor
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2011-08-19T18:34:58Z —
#16

Sega said:

Will there be design changes to the forum. I don't really have experience in this VBulletin stuff, never really needed to go in it.

According to Sarah, yes:

HAWK said:

As with any big aesthetic change ...

rguy84
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2011-08-19T18:53:50Z —
#17

deathshadow60 said:

-- that determined to drive me away, huh? It's what stopped me from going to digitalpoint.

Heh! Other changes drove me away 4 months ago

Sega said:

Will there be design changes to the forum. I don't really have experience in this VBulletin stuff, never really needed to go in it.

It is a forum. For 99% of users the change should take 30 seconds to figure out. vBulletin probably optimized stuff, so instead of having a link saying Edit signature, it is probably hidden under personal details or something. If there is a more widespread learning curve than that, it will reflect badly on SP.

r937
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2011-08-19T20:10:36Z —
#18

and of course all the css customization has been tested and verified fully functional for internet explorer 8 on windows xp...

... right?

TheRaptor
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2011-08-19T20:21:08Z —
#19

r937 said:

and of course all the css customization has been tested and verified fully functional for internet explorer 8 on windows xp...

... right?

And don't forget Interent Explorer 6 and 7!

Lemon_Juice
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2011-08-19T20:23:17Z —
#20

rguy84 said:

vBulletin probably optimized stuff, so instead of having a link saying Edit signature, it is probably hidden under personal details or something.

Ahh, I forgot about buttons with words like edit, reply, etc. The new trend of Optimizing stuff is replacing the words with small graphic icons so instead of knowing immediately what a button does you have to hunt with your mouse for any tooltips that will expain to you its purpose (if there are any, hopefully). The buttons look so great that you feel ashamed to admin you didn't immediately and instinctively know what the author of the icon image was trying to convey - if you didn't know you are clearly behind the times!

A more advanced and cutting edge techique is to hide buttons behind another graphic button so when you click on it then the rest of the buttons smoothly and beautifully roll out to your delight and you are surprised to discover they even exist! When looking at the page it's not obvious when the needed button is, you have to go looking for it but you are happy because the layout is clean, modern, clutter-free and you feel you have lots of space to breathe!